From creative AI to open-source sculpture: how tech is changing art

Technology has influenced the production of art for centuries, but in recent years tech innovation has had a major impact on the art industry in fascinating and controversial ways. Alessandro Perilli from Red Hat, an open-source IT company that recently sponsored the Tate Exchange programme, explains three key ways in which technology is changing the way we engage with, make and change art.

Technologies that enable and expand access to art

People are already very familiar with the growing number of technologies that are simplifying access to art. Tablets and smartphones are becoming the standard devices for museums to offer interactive guides to visitors, and I’m sure you saw that in the last exhibition you visited. What you may not know is that Tate started experimenting in this direction around 2010, when its iOS app allowed visitors to interact with the artwork How It Is by the Polish artist Miroslaw Balka. In seven years, technology has made huge progress, allowing a company like Google today to digitise a portion of the human artistic output preserved across the museums of the whole world in The Google Art Project. This democratises the access to arts allowing anybody in the world, for free, to experience over 45,000 objects in their current location.

Likewise, technology portals like Artsy are broadening access to art. These websites allow anybody to track a series of favourite artists, virtually collecting their masterpieces, and be informed about new paintings or sculptures or photographs from emerging artists that might match their taste based on their collections.

Access is not just about consuming art. It’s also about understanding art, and technology is helping in that area too. I just visited the David Hockney show at Tate Britain, and in the last room, two imposing artworks dominate the walls. Underneath them is a series of displays, running the animation of the whole artistic process that led to the artworks, from the initial white canvas to the final output on the walls.

What if access to art could be also about participating in art? My company, Red Hat, has been a pioneer of open source software. At the foundation of it there is the concept of open collaboration: thousands of engineers that democratically work together on a project to solve massively complex challenges, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, language or geographic location. This model based on open collaboration has proven so successful that today it’s used by the biggest companies in the world to develop open source software that supports the world economy, in every industry, from aviation to finance, from retail to entertainment. Tate is trying to do something similar with its Tate Exchange programme: fostering the collaboration between the artists and the audience so that the latter gets involved in the conversation, becomes part of the artistic process, and ultimately can also become part of the final artwork itself. That is an unprecedented effort to democratise access to art.

Technologies that enable and augments the art itself

Wasn’t the field easel a technological innovation that impacted art deeply, greatly facilitating impressionists in their efforts to paint “en plein air”? When technology is contributing directly to the creation of an artistic output, amazing and unpredictable things can happen. And in fact, they have been happening in recent years.

Some artists, for example Petros Vrellis, are using technology to unlock new dimensions in existing artworks. Petros hypnotised the world with his animated version of Starry Night by Van Gogh, capturing the imagination of a new generation of art lovers that seem more curious than ever, constantly asking “what happens if we do this?”

Other artists, like Keith Brown, are completely relying on new technologies to create their arts. Keith uses 3D printers to create original sculptures. Sometimes the 3D sculptures are finished, like the ones displayed at the Mesh 3D Printed Sculpture exhibition in the Gallery Oldham near Manchester. Other times, they are printed throughout the length of the whole exhibition. All of this opens the possibility to create art to artists that don’t possess sculpting skills but maybe have 3D design skills.

Technologies that disrupt art

There are some situations where the effect of technology on art is not necessarily benign. The more intertwined these two worlds become the more grey areas we’ll have to explore, and there’s a lot already to trigger controversy.

Think about artificial intelligence, which is getting so sophisticated that it can copy the style of an artist and apply it to new subjects, like the smartphone app Prisma. Or think about 3D printers, again, that can create perfect copies of existing masterpieces. Maybe you remember the famous leak of the 3D scan of the Nefertiti bust displayed at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, and the subsequent release of those files online for free?

What happens to the value of an original artwork when the style of the artist, or the artwork itself can be replicated at very low cost or for free? Can technology industrialise or even commoditise art in the same way we moved from handicraft to mass-production?

If this is not concerning enough, think about what will happen when artificial intelligence can understand enough about human creativity to develop new, original artistic styles on its own.

So I leave you with a couple of final questions: What will happen to human artists once AI can do most of what they do, and better? And how will human creativity find a way to express itself in that world?

More like this:

When I started my foundation in art I was already quite ill, and I don’t know what kind of illness to call it but I was very depressed-stroke-anxious. I go to my foundation at art college and everyone was really expressive and doing their ‘passionate art’ but I seemed to have switched off that button completely. I became interested in community art — focusing away from my own work.

Technological advancement is, if you’ve momentarily forgotten, altering the way we interact with pretty much everything. It speeds up the product production process, its changed with we way communicate with friends, and even how we get a pizza delivered on a day when we’re too hungover to amble to the shops. It’s even, somehow, affecting what we read — only last week AI Instagram influencer Lil Miquela made her writing debut for Dazed.

Jodie Cariss works as part of Forever Curious, a creative initiative set up to work with local east London primary schools. One of the many things they offer is a series of “buddy up” sessions, where industry professionals share stories with a view to make them come to life. Below, Cariss writes how increasingly important it is that these initiatives exist in a climate where cuts are rife and asks: What next for a generation let down by state funding for the arts?

The world feels messy. Politically unstable. A growing sense of slowly mounting chaos and fear over the unknown. One of the UK’s worst-hit areas is the education system. Teachers are leaving in droves. The National Audit Office has tasked mainstream schools with making £3 billion in savings by 2019 – that’s around £800 per pupil. Nearly a quarter of the teachers who qualified since 2011 have already quit the job.

Inevitably, money for creativity and the arts within the curriculum has been fiercely reduced, in some areas to non-existence. Our schools are facing a scarcity of teachers – or at least, many with depleted energy after meeting growing demands – and art cupboards with just one ream of A4 paper for 900 students. I’ve seen it with my own eyes in a Hackney school.

So what happens to a generation of young people, particularly the 4.1 million who are classed as underprivileged, with limited opportunities at home, and fewer at school?

There will be a rise in adolescents with behavioural issues, leading to a less mentally-well adult generation. We know creativity has a direct correlation to the way we feel and how we express emotion, and poor mental health is already on the rise, with one in four people experiencing a problem each year.
Without sounding like the doctor of doom, the education crisis will pave the way for social and creative regression. Why? Because creativity is fundamental to the way we understand the world, form and keep relationships and develop our own sense of self. The ability to create, which begins in early development as play and forms the foundation of the way we find meaning in later life, is essential for a balanced and stimulated generation.

In Design as an Attitude, design critic and author Alice Rawsthorn sets out to squash the stereotypes, by celebrating design’s ability to better the world we live in, especially in light of its currently tumultuous future. Arguing that design is a powerful force in all of our lives, she questions why it is often dismissed as a “manipulative commercial ploy”.

The founder of Don’t Panic and multi-award-winning youth marketing agency Livity Sam Conniff Allende has always believed in doing business a bit differently. Here, in the run up to his talk at Nicer Tuesdays later this month, he tells us why, as inequality rises, we all need to re-learn how to break the rules.

For the past 11 years It’s Nice That’s mission to champion creativity has remained at the core of what we do. The team here are committed to bringing you the best and most inspiring creative work from across the world, organising events that will entertain you, and producing magazines you will cherish for years to come.

Even if, technically speaking, working on illustrations is Antti Kalevi’s job, it seems as if he just can’t stop himself finding things to draw. For Antti, artistic inspiration is everywhere and most commonly found through “travelling, food, music and the fine arts". These moments then filter into his illustrative practice once he photographs his surroundings of simply anything that catches his eye.

2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the original publication of photography focused, Provoke magazine. In November of last year, the independent Tokyo-based bookshop and publisher Nitesha reissued all three magazines of the rare publication into one eye-opening compendium. Portraying post-war Japan and the country’s socioeconomic tribulations of the 1960s unlike any other photographic journal; Provoke established a legendary reputation amongst Japanese photography fans for its historical and aesthetic insight.

John Edmonds is a Brooklyn-based photographer whose tender imagery and portraiture hones in on the “performative gestures and self-fashioning of young black men on the streets of America”. With a significant body of work exploring themes of identity, community and desire, John’s first monograph titled Higher brings together four series made between 2011 and 2018.

Hello and welcome to what is traditionally regarded as the most depressing day of the year. Isn’t that a simultaneously bleak and comforting prospect? Today might be hell but look, in a few hours it’s all over and the rest of 2019 will be an absolute breeze.

Mention Final Fantasy in conversation and you’ll notice it often creates a sudden pause. A former player will tend to become misty-eyed as they relive joyful hours spent plonked in front of the telly, engulfed in a role-playing game that changed teenage lives and the face of video gaming. The seventh edition of Final Fantasy, released in 1997 ten years after the first iteration, causes this reaction more than any other game of its ilk. Final Fantasy VII was in fact so seminal that at the beginning of 2017 it warranted a 27,000-word essay by Polygon’s features editor Matt Leone titled 500 Years Later: An Oral History of Final Fantasy VII. Just a few days after it was published online, the plans to reimagine Matt’s essay as a book had already begun.

“I used to think we lived in a styleless age,” says the New York-based illustrator Tug Rice. “Early on, my illustrations tried to infuse some glamour into the world I saw… But now, I’ve come to appreciate the beauty and sophistication of this decade.” Tug’s theatrically-realistic style of illustration is less and less seen in contemporary illustration circles, but its elegance and fluidity continue to beguile clients, making his kind of illustration highly commissionable despite its more traditional roots.

Scottish-born, London-based designer Caterina Bianchini joined us at December’s Nicer Tuesdays at the tail end of last year, taking us through the process behind her work which filtered into See You At The Dance, a recent book compiling her poster work.

This week’s Friday Mixtape comes from not just one It’s Nice That illustration favourite, but two! While at After School Club in Offenbach during the summer of last year, we had a beer with resident illustrators Jan Buchczik and Timo Lenzen who told us about their love of music, often listening together in their shared studio.

London-based design and art direction studio B.A.M recently started work on its identity for White Cube gallery, with an unusual aim: “I have a strong view that an identity, especially for White Cube, should be invisible,” co-founder of the studio David McKendrick tells It’s Nice That. Across its galleries the White Cube houses impeccable artworks and B.A.M quickly identified this as a focal point. In turn, the studio didn’t want to design an identity which would draw eyes away from the likes of Gilbert and George or Tracey Emin, but instead, build the graphic design foundations which would house the artworks, and enhance them too.

There’s a new VR game coming out at the end of this month, and it’s sure to give Beat Saber a run for its money. The brainchild of renowned games designer Sos Sosowski, Mosh Pit Simulator was actually created by accident two years ago when Sos was playing around with simple AI algorithms to programme human models. This serendipitous discovery informs the basis of Mosh Pit Sumlator, whose characters, called “zombies”, flip-flop around in jerky movement according to the code: “if chest is below 1m, bump chest up”. The premise for Mosh Pit Simulator centres around these manic, “brainless, boneless humanoid creatures” in this highly anticipated, albeit slightly mad, new game.

“I wouldn’t call this a book about fashion. Some men talk about fashion, many simply talk about clothes; there’s a distinction,” explains Eliot Haworth, on the new release from the makers of Fantastic Man: What Men Wear. An anthology of Fantastic Man’s online feature Questionnaire which instigates conversations from one question – “What garment is key to your personal style?” – the publication brings together a selection of insightful figures to create an oral history of male dressing in the 21st Century.

Currently showing at the Museum of the City of New York, a unique exhibition is filling the walls of the galleries. Titled Interior Lives: Contemporary Photographs of Chinese New Yorkers, this exhibition provides an unseen glimpse into the lives of the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia.

Illustrator Isabella Cotier’s work has an expressive energy to it that can only really be achieved when you’re working from life. Her depictions of characters observed as they go about their daily lives are funny, vivid, loose and immediate; capturing moments without necessarily being literal.

While on a solo trip through the Argentinian Lake District photographer Alice Zoo chanced across a travelling circus setting up its stage. Both Alice and the performers seemed to have arrived in town at the same time, as the photographer spotted them putting together a Big Top tent as she walked back to her accommodation one night.

Those of you with a memory for such things will likely be able to recall the last piece of work by filmmaker Jenny Schweitzer we featured on It’s Nice That. Girls in Chess was, as the title suggests, an exploration of the gender gap in the world of competitive American scholastic chess. It was charming, funny, warm – the sort of short film you foist upon friends and family, knowing full well that they’ll love it as much as you did. Now turning her lens towards an open, honest, and at times hilarious account of life in a retirement home nestled on the shore of the Hudson River in the Bronx, New York. We’re almost certain that her latest project, The Blessings of Aging, will garner the same reaction.

In February 2016, London-based publisher and filmmaker Freddie Fraser-Forsyth launched topsafe.tv, a platform to showcase films made without briefs or brand involvement. Through providing this platform, and a resulting collaboration with Stop Play Record, Freddie met a load of people he wouldn’t have otherwise, and received a whole load more cold email submissions from directors. “Through these experiences I learned what the London film industry at grassroots level was like and how difficult it was to make work you love,” he tells us of the decision to start his magazine Next 2 Nothing.

As a visual artist, the pressure to be current and “cool” can weigh you down. Korean born-and-raised, now New York-based illustrator Haleigh Mun tells It’s Nice That about her creative development to embrace her own visual style, whether it’s seen as cutting-edge, or not.

Websites, publications, identities, typefaces – Switzerland-based design studio Omnigroup can do it all. What started out as a loose collaboration between Luke Archer, Leonardo Azzolini, Frederik Mahler-Andersen and Simon Mager, is now a fully-functioning studio working on a variety of projects in the fields of art, design and music.

Scottish filmmaker Duncan Cowles took to the stage at December’s Nicer Tuesdays event. With his deadpan humour in tow, Duncan talked us through his collection of films so far, from the infamous The Lady with the Lamp made while he was studying at Edinburgh College of Art, to his more recent Taking Stock for Channel 4’s Random Acts and It’s Not Amazing Enough for TED.

This Winter It’s Nice That is partnering with Adobe Stock on a series of articles that celebrate their collection of millions of high-quality images, graphics, video motion graphics, templates, and branding materials. This also includes a large collection of logo and identify motifs and illustrations designers can utilise during the research of a project.

Los Angeles: songs, sagas and whole industries have been built within the city. It’s no mean feat to document the self-proclaimed “city of angels” through the landscapes of two-dimensional print, but graphic designer Stefanie Tam achieves this in the form of three books centred around a personal love letter to the city.

London-based photographer Ronan McKenzie was our second speaker at December’s Nicer Tuesdays, taking the audience through her portfolio of work to date, honing in on a recent exhibition she put on, I’m Home in October 2018.

“When I draw, I like to think about the nature and structure of each line. How the concepts and ideas are hidden in their own morphology. And how the metaphors and the allegories are created with it,” says Rotterdam-based artist José Quintanar AKA José Ja Ja Ja. Working across narrative drawings, illustration and books, José’s practice sees him exploring the possibilities of drawing as a tool, and his work has been published by The New York Times, Vice, Esquire and many more.

Graphic design studio Arc specialises in printed matter but, occasionally, drifts over into the realms of web and exhibition design. Founded by Joachim Bartsch, Timo Grimberg and Toni Schönbuchner, the Berlin-based studio has an impressive turnover of projects; paying homage to the Swiss school of design with their typography-centred layouts.

Regular Practice is a London-based design studio comprising of Tom Finn and Kristoffer Soelling. Having met at the Royal College of Art, the duo has produced project after project with beautiful graphics – and sound concepts to back them up. Including a self-populating work for the identity of their previous college, and an architectural journal for the University of Puerto Rico, a constant across the duo’s portfolio is microscopic attention to experimental type and printing techniques.

Previous to completing her master’s degree at the Royal College of Art, artist Viviana Troya studied fine art in her native country of Colombia. Having graduated last year, Viviana is now exhibiting as part of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries at Peckham’s South London Gallery, showing her latest work Hatchery until 24 February this year.

For photographer Maximilian Virgili, travel opens up possibilities for his work. Settling in the medium as a documentary, travel-focused photographer, his discovery of this niche was largely “because whenever I travelled I had time to really focus on my work,” he tells It’s Nice That. This time spent in another part of the world melted away any worries the photographer had; he felt confident to try new ideas and the processing of the photographs would happen when he returned home. It gave him the room to do what photographers do best: take pictures.

London-based creative agency Anyways, a sister company to It’s Nice That and part of the HudsonBec Group, always approaches projects by looking for meaningful ways to display creativity. One of the agency’s most recent projects is two animated shorts for workspace company Fora, announcing its new locations in Soho and Spitalfields. The animations may differ in location and animator, but the historical context and vibrant communities of each area are at the heart of Anyways’ art direction.

Joining us from Germany for the last Nicer Tuesdays talk of 2018 was the renowned illustrator, Christoph Niemann. An illustrator celebrated for his endlessly-brilliant portfolio of books and spot illustrations for publications, Christoph joined us to talk through a larger project: a mural.

We use cookies on this website to analyse your use of our products and services, provide content from third parties and assist with our marketing efforts. Learn more about our use of cookies and available controls: cookie policy. Please be aware that your experience may be disrupted until you accept cookies.